Whittington

by Alan Armstrong

  “Anyway,” Abby continued, “even if you can’t see, you can sense things like trees and stones in your way.”

  The Lady couldn’t. Ben couldn’t either. As they bumped and stumbled along, the Lady asked Whittington, “How can you see where you’re going?”

  “I’m nocturnal,” he answered.

  The Lady was too proud to ask what “nocturnal” meant. It always annoyed her when Whittington used big words. She’d had a brother who was a smarty like that. Alas, he got taken by the hawk. As soon as she remembered that, she forgave Whittington.

  The cat sensed her annoyance. “It means I’m a night creature,” he said.

  Then they could all see. The pond loomed like an opal. It seemed to float in its own light above the land around it. They could see the puffs their breaths made.

  The owls were out. You could hear them. Ben picked up their call. When the cat nudged him and whispered, “Whistle!” Ben gave a low, fluttering call that drifted down in tone like the owls’ love song. “Again!” Whittington said. Ben whistled again.

  They heard something. A few seconds later there was a rush of wind overhead, then a screech of rage as the owl Ben had called discovered the trick. In his surprise, the owl dropped the kill he’d been carrying to his mate. Something soft and furry hit Ben’s shoulder and thumped to the ground. Ben shrieked. They all ran away as fast as they could.

  “What were you doing?” Bernie asked as they stumbled back into the barn. The kids were bright-cheeked and out of breath. Whittington was fluffed up, like when he’d fought Havey. The Lady had flap-dashed all the way back; it would take her a while to settle her feathers.

  Bernie was loading the jugs on the sled. He didn’t wait for an answer.

  He let the kids go out before him, then he pushed the door to and slid in place the board that held it shut. Anyone who wanted to could get in, but this was Bernie’s way of locking up.

  As Bernie and the kids stumped up the hill, the Lady settled into her nest of hay and feathers by the door. The cat lay down close beside her. The rats came out to dance, squeaking, leaping, mock-boxing, chasing tails, rolling over each other in somersaults and flips, all to their own music. It happened every night after Bernie left. As suddenly as it had begun, their dance ended and they went their separate ways to hunt for food.

  When they came back, the rats rolled up together in a warm ball in their underground sleeping parlor.

  The Lady turned her head almost completely around and tucked her bill under her wing. The chickens did the same with their beaks. Whittington’s nose was under his paws, one folded over the other. The horses closed their eyes. Soon the only sounds in the barn were breathing and an occasional snort when one of the horses blew out a hay tickle.

  ONE MORNING the kids and Bernie noticed that Spooker didn’t frisk around the paddock to greet them when they arrived. She pawed the ground. More alarming, she didn’t eat. At noon, when Bernie went back with Havey, Spooker was lying on her side, rolling and groaning. Havey went over, sniffed her thoughtfully, and investigated her droppings. The dog took a scientific interest in illness. If a chicken was sick, Havey nosed it like a medic. A dead one she’d stand over soberly, like a paid mourner.

  Bernie called the vet. The vet told him to get Spooker back on her feet and keep her walking until she could get there.

  “Colic,” the vet said. “Cramps. She’s rolling to get the pain out. Get her walking or she’ll get her stomach all twisted up and then there’s no saving her.”

  Bernie tried to get her up but he couldn’t. He called Al and Wayne, the mechanic, to come out from the Texaco. They shut down the station and rushed over to save the horse.

  Al brought along the hand winch they used to move cars. It had a broad belt at one end and a hook at the other. He fixed the hook to a stanchion and worked the belt under the horse.

  The three men cranked the winch and got Spooker up. She groaned deeply with every breath and kept trying to lie down again. She wasn’t interested in walking. Havey sat and watched. She’d never shown such interest in the horse before.

  The vet’s ambulance was a red pickup with heavy tires, stainless steel lockers and drawers built into the sides, a sterilizer, drums of water and medicine, pumps, hoses, and a small crane at the back. There were spotlights front and back so she could work out in a field if necessary. She could drive it anywhere. She had big, strong hands, sure hands. She spoke to Spooker with her hands.

  The vet closed her eyes and put her ear to the horse’s side, then to her belly.

  “Colic.”

  She looked in Spooker’s mouth.

  “Teeth need filing.”

  “Uh-oh,” Bernie said. “The man who shoes ’em called a while back to set it up. I forgot.”

  “Horse teeth are too important to forget,” the vet said. “It’s not like your forgetting to floss. I’ll explain why in a minute.”

  From one of the truck lockers she took a container of castor oil and a small pump with a hose. She added calming medicine to the oil and stuck the hose into the horse’s mouth. The vet pumped; the horse gagged. Spooker tried to back away but the stuff went down.

  They tied her head to the stanchion. The vet got out a thick, stubby rasp. With Bernie and the others cooing at the wide-eyed horse, the vet pried open Spooker’s jaws, locked them open with a chock of wood, and proceeded to file the edges of her teeth to make them sharp.

  “She’s worn the edges off, so she’s not chewing fine enough,” the vet explained. “What she’s swallowing is too big to pass through. The mass gets jammed in her gut, it ferments, gas builds up and cramps her. Another few hours, it would have taken operating to save her.”

  Bernie said he’d seen that operation on 60 Minutes.

  “They cut open that horse,” he said, “took out yards and yards of gut, found the blockage, cut that out, sewed up the pipe, stuffed the guts back inside that horse every which way, sewed her up again.

  “And you know, she lived!

  “What was it that you added to the oil?”

  “The narcotic? It’s for her cramps. Codeine and something like Pepto-Bismol. She’ll doze on that all day and most of tomorrow. If I’d given you that dose, you’d be off playing harps.”

  As the vet packed her kit, she said, “Watch her poops. She’s going to go a lot the next day or two because of the castor oil, then she’ll taper off to what she’s supposed to do regular, which is four or five a day. It’s like my Italian grandma said, ‘Clear bowels, a merry heart.’”

  Bernie kept Spooker strapped so she couldn’t lie down. She was in dreamland for the better part of two days, doing everything the vet said she would do. In her professional capacity, Havey studied every evidence of that horse. Then Spooker was better and very hungry and forgot how they’d tied her up and purged her and made her mouth hurt. Forgetting is forgiving.

  THE SUN WAS GAINING on winter. There was a new smell in the air. The pond boomed and cracked as the ice broke up. In the paddock bare places appeared with puddles of meltwater the Lady found pleasant for bathing. There were robins and the scree of red-winged blackbirds claiming territory still under snow. Around the pond margin, celandines made tiny suns and skunk cabbages bloomed squat, plum-colored cowls streaked with gold. They were rank-smelling. Nobody ate them. Winter rye in the fields was going from yellow to green as it unrumpled. With the finches it was all the other way. Bernie counted spring from when the finches started going from dirty green to yellow.

  The road was grease again. Bernie had to hike down the hill. The pump had thawed free, though, so there was water handy. Coraggio and his band of bantams were parading out farther and farther every day after morsels, infuriating Marker, the dog who watched everything from the house on the hill.

  The rooster was expert at kicking away straw and dung and finding knots of pink worms. When he turned those up, the bantams cheered as if they’d found candy. The Lady followed too, eager for new green shoots and the fat gray grubs Coraggio exca
vated. The bantams were back to laying eggs. Abby and Ben hunted for them. The rats were holding to the pact. There were occasional stinks from eggs the bantams forgot and the kids didn’t find. The stink of a rotten egg is noble.

  It worried Abby the way the chickens went after worms. In school Mrs. Harris told them that worms plow more soil than all the tractors in the world. Abby figured the way Coraggio and his gang were going after them, there wouldn’t be any worms left.

  Ben struggled with his half dozen words a day, trying not to guess, taking his time. They’d abandoned Abby’s spelling book. The cat said those words were too advanced, they should concentrate on everyday words— words for things the boy could see, like “egg,” “ice,” “chicken,” “barn,” “horse.” Ben did better with those. What worked best, though, were Dick’s maxims, like “Tell Truth, and shame the Devil.” Ben read that through once with Abby helping. The second time he got it on his own. He was tickled.

  “But he’s not reading,” Abby said. “He memorized. He’s reciting.”

  “So what?” said the cat. “That’s the way Dick learned, reciting from memory as he followed the letters.”

  Abby wasn’t sure that counted.

  Whittington had some more of Dick’s rememberables for Abby to copy and tape up under “PSALM”:

  “A cat may look on a King.”

  “If you know not me, you know nobody.”

  “Time and tide wait for no man.”

  “What is no good for the bee is no good for the hive.”

  “And here’s one by a dog about his dead master,” Whittington added:

  Augustus Jones taught me to beg.

  Upon his bones I lift my leg.

  Ben read them on his own the second time through. Abby was still dubious. “That’s not going to help him with his book in school. And it isn’t touching numbers. The worst is the numbers.” Ben glowered; the cat’s eyes narrowed.

  “Enough!” the Lady said. “Time for the story.”

  WHITTINGTON TOOK HIS PLACE.

  “By the time the merchant saw Dick off at Lime-house Wharf, the boy had become more than his clerk. Fitzwarren gave him a square of blue silk to tie around his neck for luck. Dick was eleven. He knew which fabrics and spices would do well in the shop, how to judge their quality, how much to pay for them. Fitzwarren knew he would find good things and buy wisely. If the voyage went well, the shop would profit.

  “The risk of it, though, was more than a merchant’s risk for Fitzwarren. The boy had gained a place in his heart. Then, as now, the sea claimed many, what with storms, wars, pirates, and the risk of diseases like scurvy on board and plague in port.”

  “What’s scurvy?” Ben asked.

  “On long voyages without fresh fruits and vegetables the crew’s gums began to bleed, they got bruises, and their joints went bad. We know now it’s caused by lack of vitamin C.”

  “Gran gives us stuff with vitamin C,” Abby said.

  The cat nodded. “We make our own. Only humans have that problem.

  “The ship Dick and his cat hauled away in was small and vulnerable,” he continued. “Her mainsail had a strange green stripe across the top. The other sails in the harbor were tan, brown, and white. From her forward halyard she flew the flag of St. George, a red cross on a white field. It was a sign that the vessel was from a Christian country. From where Fitzwarren stood the ship looked tiny.

  “The sea was bigger than anything Dick had ever seen, boring and endless until the wind moaned and slammed and it became hills and swoops of black oil he was sure would drown him as the ship heaved and shuddered worse than the agent’s carriage when the robbers attacked it.

  “Their trip took three weeks. The cat got her sea legs quickly. Dick was seasick for days. His bed was a shallow bunk. It was always moving. He wanted more than anything for his bed to hold still. The only light came from an oil lamp that guttered and shifted on its mounting near his head. The smoke didn’t help how he felt.

  Then one day he was well. He was never seasick again. He slept on deck no matter what the weather.

  “The fresh food ran out and the water grew stale. They ate porridge, dried apples, salt fish and salt pork, peas, beans, cheese, pickled cabbage, and hardtack— small ingots of saltless bread baked hard and packed dry so it wouldn’t rot. There were daily rations of hard cider. When their lines were lucky, they had fresh fish. Sometimes there were eggs from the chickens on board, sometimes a cup of goat’s milk, once a dinner of roast goat.

  “They sailed south down the coast of France, then across the Bay of Biscay to put in at Lisbon, where they got fresh water and traded for black peppercorns, wine, oil, and olives. The men they traded with served them cups of sweetened tea and dried figs. Dick’s eyes widened as he tasted for the first time the fig’s honey-like sweetness.

  “From Lisbon they sailed into the Mediterranean, past Gibraltar, where only twelve miles of water separate Europe from Africa. Dick looked to his right and there was all of Africa in a red haze.

  “On board, meanwhile, among ballast, stores, fetid water, and spilled cargo, the cat made a great slaughter of rats. It was her habit to lay the kills on deck by the hatchway. The sailors cheered as they flung the rats into the water by their tails.”

  There were moans from the dark part of the barn, where the rats were listening.

  “The cat became the pet of everyone,” Whittington continued.

  “They landed at Tripoli in North Africa and called upon the king there, who was a particular friend of the captain’s. It was he who had whispered the secret of Amapacherie, the healing herb he hoped to gain a fortune by.

  “The boy squinted in the glare. Unlike London, where they build to catch the sun, here everything was built to avoid it. The palace entrance was pale yellow. There were greenish blue tiles with Arabic writing that spelled out Above All Things Is Justice.’

  “The palace was a hodgepodge of low forts and shrines built around courtyards shaded with palm trees. The hard palm leaves clacked in the slight breeze. Dick had never seen a palm before.

  “Inside, the palace was a labyrinth of dirty, narrow passages with slit windows. The passages led to small dark rooms—closets, storage chambers, and sleeping quarters for soldiers and court retainers. The only light came from the slit windows that let in a constant stream of dust and fine sand, insects and dried leaves. The passageways were paved with bricks. There were shallow stairs where you wouldn’t expect them. A couple of times Dick stumbled in the gloom. The cat rode on his shoulder.

  “In the room where Dick was sent to wash and relieve himself a large rat jumped from the cistern, frightening the cat. In her surprise, she clawed her master. She was embarrassed and vowed vengeance on that rat.”

  “What’s a cistern?” Abby asked.

  “A large water pot,” Whittington replied.

  “And the rat was in it?” Abby asked.

  The cat nodded. Abby shuddered.

  “The throne room was round and shadowed,” he continued. “Fresh air and light came from an opening in the roof that directed a spot of brightness to one place. Very slowly the spot moved around the room. In the center the king sat, large and shapeless on a bed of embroidered silks. He held a wand of long feathers with rows of round gold-colored eyes said to spy out evil. They had been bright once. When he wanted something, he thumped his wand and four men jumped.

  “Around the room were large and small cages with peacocks, parrots, parakeets, and other birds, all whooping and chattering. Rats and mice scurried about. It smelled of bird dirt and the perfumed smoke coming from a large bronze can with holes in its sides and top. A veiled woman in a white gown passed a plate of dates to the visitors. Dick had never eaten a date before. The fruit was sweet and grainy. When she passed the plate again, he took another.

  “The king was more olive-colored than brown. His face was as smooth as a baby’s, soft, hairless, slightly wrinkled except around his eyes and forehead. His hair was long, black, pulled back, an
d tied so tight his eyes bulged. The back of his hand, when Dick bent to kiss it, was cold and sticky like a frog’s back. He was a great warrior. The birds had been given to him as tribute.

  “As the captain and the king talked, their murmuring and the steady bird racket made Dick sleepy. The cat was resting in his lap. Suddenly she stiffened, tensed, and soared across the room to land on a rat. The battle was brief. She knew exactly where to bite at the back of the neck to sever the spinal cord.

  “The king heard the rat’s death shriek. Rats ruled his palace; his kingdom was infested with vermin. When he heard how Dick Whittington’s cat had cleared the Unicorn of rats, he swore he had to have her, whatever the cost. At that moment she deposited the dead rat at his feet. There was no ratter like her in his kingdom.

  “He was rich and impatient. He was used to getting his way. He did not like to bargain because that put him on equal footing with another person. Since he was superior to everyone, his way of dealing was to take by force when he could and in every other circumstance to offer such an overwhelming price the trade was settled immediately.

  “In exchange for the cat, he offered the cargo Dick had selected from his warehouses—bales of raw cotton from the desert countries, bundles of woven silk that had come overland from China and India, dyestuffs, rare gums, wrapped blocks of opium, casks of wine and oil, circles of pressed figs, cakes of precious sugar, sacks of cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, cloves.

  “Dick was astonished. The cat was more than his friend. He had more feeling for her than for anyone. Yet she was looking up at him with the strange knowing look she’d given him the first time he’d seen her in front of Greencoat’s. Her look said ‘okay’ and suggested he keep silent. He couldn’t speak anyway; he could hardly breathe.

  “The king was so anxious to buy the cat, he took the boy’s silence for a merchant’s shrewdness to get a better price.

  “With a slap of his fat hands and an angry squeal, he ordered his first man to bring a bag of jewels. Dick was too bewildered to say anything. The captain was kicking him and muttering. The cat sat in Dick’s lap looking on and purring loudly.